The Malaysian Solution

Take a country populated by diverse communities, the indigenous and
immigrant, of roughly equal size. These communities profess
different religions and ply different trades. The immigrants are
better at business; the natives prefer to till their soil. It could
be a description of Palestine with its native Palestinians and the
immigrant Jewish communities. But here the comparison ends. In
Malaysia, the communities live in peace without UN peacekeepers,
they pursue their cultural and religious interests without
submitting to bleaching multiculturalism, their country prospers
while rejecting the IMF recipes, and it is a native son of soil who
stands at the helm of good ship Malaysia.

On a less formal note, Malaysia is warm, wet and exotic. On the
monsoon-swayed shore of Andaman Sea, a long-tailed, lithe monkey
throws coconuts from the heights of a palm tree, flying fishes jump
out of the warm blue sea and splash back, a white triangular sail
rises on the horizon. Indians serve their sweet and punchy tea, teh
tarik, pouring it with gusto in pulling motion, and neatly place
curry on ecologically-sound banana leaves. Malay fishermen unload
their haul on the shore and sort it under a broad banyan tree. At
night, hundreds of stalls open at the Night Bazaar, feeding,
dressing and entertaining locals and tourists.

In Malacca, the oldest-in-East-Asia Catholic church stands next to
the Great Mosque next to a Vishnu temple next to a Taoist pagoda.
The Dutch-built austere Town Hall is surrounded by spacious British
colonial mansions. Narrow streets preserve the charm of the
Seventeenth Century, when the Malaccan sultanate was the hub of
commerce. Many of its denizens bear proud Portuguese names, but in
appearance they do not differ from other residents.

In Penang, old Hakka smugglers warm their bones on the wooden
jetties that form a floating island off Georgetown. Tamils sell junk
on Armenian street, next to the most advanced chip plant, home to
Athlon microprocessor. Yuppies have not taken over all of the Old
City, and it reminds of Jaffa as it was before 1948: a modest,
humane Eastern city. The glorious Oriental Hotel preserves the days
of Somerset Maugham and the Straits' Settlements. Delightful and
modish Chinese girls flock out of the convent school. Native Malays
carry on their unruffled life in peaceful villages, happily serve in
the army and provide the backbone of the administration.

Islam is the state religion, as it had been in the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Centuries, when it peacefully seeped in and eventually
became preferred to the older Hindu beliefs. Brought by the traders,
Malay Islam is exceedingly tolerant, local, thoroughly adjusted to
the place, as it is practically everywhere but on the pages of the
New York Times. The girls do not cover their faces, but often wear a
scarf, like religious Jewish women. On Fridays, men like to go to a
mosque for prayer, the great social unifier and integrator. As
Communism was always frowned-upon in Malaya, Islam is the preferred
style of social movement.

Prosperity is ubiquitous: perfect roads, new cars, brushed-up and
restored relics of the past. There are no beggars, no striking
poverty. Malaysians live well: they have given up home cooking and
eat out in countless restaurants and at the stalls, where one dollar
buys a square meal. Neighbouring Thais and Indonesians flock in and
to cook their national dishes. The Twin Towers in the centre of
futuristic Kuala Lumpur are the tallest in the world. 9/11 did not
happen here, and the hotel security's main worry is Durian,
strong-smelling fruit the tourists are prone to smuggle in,
disregarding the "No Durian beyond this point" signs.

It is a peaceful land: one rarely sees a policeman or a soldier.
There are no security guards in the shopping centres, no visible
tension, no American troops or bases, no prostitution, gambling and
narcotics. Evening open-air parties, much swimming in the warm sea,
friendly chat, unrushed small trade: in short, a relaxing spot. How
come . why do they not fight, these people of different backgrounds?

The secret of the Malaysian success was given away by their Prime
Minister, Dr Mahathir bin Muhammad, whom local newspapers
affectionately call 'Dr M': "It is better to share a pie than to
have all of no pie." In the 1960s, Malaysia was torn by strife, for
the native rural Malays felt threatened by the economic success of
the Chinese and Indian immigrants, city dwellers with a long
tradition of market economy. Numerically, the natives were hardly a
majority, rather a plurality, of citizens. Economically, they were
nowhere. Riots were frequent, and destruction appeared imminent. A
pie was there to share: mineral resources, oil deposits, tin and
rubber, an educated work force, a relatively small population; but
the same is true for many countries that nevertheless came to grief.

Where others failed, the Malaysians succeeded: they pursued a New
Economic Policy (later called a New Development Policy), aimed to
correct imbalances in agreement between the communities. That the
pie of national economy should grow and the respective shares of the
communities should be increasingly equalised was the idea of NEP and
NDP. The prospering immigrant communities understood that disparity
can ruin their good life, and agreed to affirmative action in the
interest of the indigenous people. The indigenous Malays acquiesced
to this relatively slow process.

The affirmative action is not too radical: a Malay student has
priority if he wants to study medicine or business management, as
before the NEP there were just a few Malay doctors, businessmen,
administrators. The native Malay gets a five percent discount when
he buys an apartment. Malay businesses have some small tax breaks.
In new developments, the developers have to secure 10 percent of
flats and houses for the Malays, in order to avoid ghetto formation.
Malay is the national language, but there are street signs in
Chinese and English; Islam is the state religion, but there is full
freedom to practise other religions as well.

A guest from distant Palestine, I cried: Eureka! If we, Israelis and
Palestinians, would learn from the Malaysian success, establish
equality and take affirmative action to ensure a fair share for each
community, Palestine would be at least as prosperous and happy as
Malaysia. Even the notorious Jewish settlements would cause little
irritation if their founders would ensure a fair share of
Palestinian residents. (Nowadays, a Palestinian is not allowed even
to tread on their fenced grounds.) Malaysia is an example to
emulate. Let us follow the Malaysian way, erase partition, restore
broken unity, return refugees home and live together happily ever
after. Wealthy and privileged minorities can impose their will for a
while, but in the long run, only agreement and fair sharing a la
Malaysia will work.

Not only in Palestine: This is a general panacea against the malady
of inequality and national strife. In the Twentieth Century, the
Masters of Discourse promoted their own patent medicine: partition
and transfer. Liberally applied in Greece and Turkey, on the Indian
subcontinent, in the Middle East, in the Balkans and Eastern Europe,
in the former Soviet Union, and this has already ruined half a
planet. Nowhere had it improved things. Subcontinent Muslims I meet
regret the day Pakistan was torn off India. From Tajikistan to
Belarus people dream of returning of the Soviet Union. Hungarians
and Czechs feel nostalgia for …sterreich. Ravaged Smyrna, devastated
Sudetenland and bleeding Palestine confirm that partition wounds do
not heal for centuries, and that population transfer ensures future
massacres. It should be undone.

The Malaysian way of integration had an alternative, the way of
partition, and it was pursued by Singapore, a splinter
Overseas-Chinese city-state at the tip of the Malay Peninsula. It
has some similarities to the Jewish state: authoritarian rule, vast
employment of foreign guest workers, aggressive stance towards their
integrated neighbours. A great friend of Israel and the Far East
base of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, Singapore is an
important link in the global system of currency trading, an integral
part of the New World Order, a supporter of the US and Australia.
Singapore is better than Israel: it did not expel its native Malays,
did not conquer the Peninsula, did not launch aggressive wars. It
could be a free and peaceful city-state, but the dynamics of
partition made it a potential source of trouble. By taking a leaf
from Israel's book, Singapore declared its 'right' to wage war on
Malaysia if the country hikes the price of the water it sells to the
island.

Singapore poisons the minds of the Malaysian Chinese and encourages
their immigration to the island. It is a very unnecessary thing, for
the Malaysian Chinese community is well integrated in their country.
In Penang, there is a Chinese Prime Minister, and, despite
affirmative action, the Chinese retain commanding heights in the
economy. What is worse, Singapore politicians try to influence
decision-making of in the People's Republic, the economic giant with
little political will of its own. It is proof that the evils caused
by choosing the partition model do not stop at partition but have
lasting, damaging effect on the world.

How the Malaysians did it

The ruling block of moderate nationalist Malays and its Chinese and
Indian counterparts have managed the country since the 1960s, and Dr
M, actually a medical doctor by profession, has served as the Prime
Minister for over twenty years. Next year he will retire at the ripe
age of 78. He came to power as a young radical and Malay
nationalist, expressing the natives' disappointment over the
too-slow progress in levelling economic misbalance between the
communities. His victory scared the immigrant communities and made
them more amenable to Malay demands. But Dr M carried out reforms
gradually and gently. Under his rule, Malaysia became a prosperous
industrial nation, a leader in computers as well as in traditional
pursuits. Even more important, it is a rather happy land of
contented people.

Malaysia rejected the Western idea of nation-state, as it accepted
the many-coloured mosaic of its communities. They are not three, but
rather thirty-three. The Chinese form many communities of various
languages, cultures and religions. There are Cantonese, Swatow,
Hakka, Hokkien, as distinct as Sicilians and Swedes. Indians are
equally diverse: Muslim and Hindu, Punjabis, Tamils, Bengalis. The
native Malays also form various tribes and ethnic units. The oldest
inhabitants of the Peninsula, the orang asli or `original men',
Negroid tribes akin to Australian aborigines and Indian Dravidic
people, still roam the jungles. Europeans and their descendents (of
mostly mixed marriages) live in Malacca, Penang and Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia rejected the idea of the `melting pot' as well. Communities
are not asked to integrate and assimilate; they are encouraged to
keep their identity and may attend schools in their native tongues
while keeping the same curriculum. They do not fall for the trap of
multiculturalism, either. The uncomfortable part of multiculturalism
as preached by New York is the removal of the backbone of the
nation: the rejection of the original religion and culture of the
majority. As I watched CNN on pre-Christmas days, I noticed their
fear of actually referring to the Christian holiday without
balancing it by an example of Hanukkah or Kwanza. Not so in
Malaysia: there is a state religion and a state language, and
tolerance of minorities.

Most importantly, Malaysia rejected the faith of Neo-Liberalism.
Together with Castro and the Pope, Dr M is an outspoken critic of
the Chicago School. He does not want to sell assets to the highest
bidder, nor thereby to impoverish people and create a new class of
super-rich. Food and housing are inexpensive and often subsidised.
Dr M is not a socialist. He prefers a strong middle class, but he
was taught enough Mencius (Mengzi), the Second Sage of Confucianism,
to know of the obligation of rulers to provide for the common
people.

The Neo-Liberalists tried to devour Malaysia. The Scourge of
Nations, the Imperial Wizard [See Heather Cottin, `George Soros,
Imperial Wizard', CovertAction Quarterly, No 74, Fall 2002.] George
Soros, a mysterious man with unlimited resources and strong ties to
the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, who broke the Bank of
England, ruined Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand, attacked Malaysia,
too. His financial offensive wiped out ten years of Malaysian
development and ten years of 20 million men's labour: a cool $30
billion of damage. The country would have been devastated but for Dr
M, who slammed currency controls into place.

After the Soros plague, Malaysia asked for help from the IMF and the
World Bank, and was told that aid is conditional upon acceptance of
IMF rules, including lifting of currency controls. Ostensibly, that
was the purpose of Soros's raid: to break the country, to send it
running to the IMF and to turn it into a vassal of the New World
Order. All nations that accepted IMF rules were ruined: from
Argentina to Bulgaria, from South Africa to Russia.

Eduardo Galeano, the noted Uruguayan writer, in a recent interview,
said: "Argentina did everything it was ordered to do by the
International Monetary Fund and it's destroyed. The lesson is not to
buy into IMF discourse, which leads not only to the extermination of
national economies, but to horrific consequences that are not only
economic. A discourse that not only translates into mass
impoverishment and an offensive concentration of wealth, but into
slaps in the face, the daily insults that are the ostentation of the
power of the few, in the face of the helplessness of the many... It
discredits democracy. Nowadays, it is identified with corruption,
inefficiency, injustice, which is the worst thing that could happen
to democracy. Another tremendous injury is the great damage that the
culture of solidarity has suffered all these years. Right now the
predominant culture is that of "every man for himself," and if you
fall, you're screwed.

The new name for the financial dictatorship is the "international
community" ; anything that you do to defend the little that remains
of your sovereignty is "an attack against the international
community", rather than an act of legitimate defence against the
usury practiced by the banking system that rules the world, in which
the more you pay, the more you owe. That is why in a country like
Argentina everything has been dismantled: the economy, the state,
the collective identity of a people who no longer know who they are,
from where they came or where they are going.."

The stubborn old man, Dr M refused to accept the IMF diktat, and
Malaysia retained its prosperous independence. It did not go under
as Russia and Argentina, because its ruler was a determined man who
deeply felt his solidarity with his people. But it was not an easy
feat: Dr M had to fight a to-the-last-man-standing battle with his
Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, the IMF supporter in Kuala
Lumpur. Anwar Ibrahim used the Soros-inflicted depression and
stirred unrest. A weaker man, a Gorbachev, would have collapsed and
vacated his seat, plunging the country into chaos. Dr M is made of
sterner stuff: he deftly dealt with the Neo-Liberal by using some
old and not-too-liberal laws against homosexuality. That was a
correct if difficult decision: In similar vein, the Americans had
sent Al Capone to jail on a trumped-up charge of small tax evasion,
as they could not make other charges stick. An IMF supporter is no
better than a gangster.

However, for many Malaysian intellectuals this was a traumatic
experience: they would have preferred correct results to be obtained
by correct means. "Dearie, don't we all! But we can't put 'IMF
support' into the penal code", I said to them. "The ruler has a duty
to his people to protect them from neo-liberal wolves, and this
obligation precedes his personal ethics."

Soros retained a menacing presence in Malaysia. He paid for a Web
magazine and repeatedly tried to buy a newspaper to brainwash
Malaysians, as he does elsewhere, notably in Russia. In a Kuala
Lumpur hotel, I met Malaysian fellow journalists who expectedly
complained about another very non-Western Malaysian precept, that of
government-controlled media. This would have been an embarrassing
moment for me if I had not heard this complaint twelve years ago, in
the offices of Russian newspapers. The Russians had no Dr M of their
own; they privatised their media. It was snatched up by a bunch of
moguls and turned into subversion tools against Russia. Now, almost
all Russian media belongs to a galore of Israeli citizens.

That is why I told my Malaysian colleagues: "Sorry, guys. If you had
had it your way and made your newspapers and TV independent of
government, you would have had a lot of fun for a whole week. One
week later, your media would have been bought by George Soros, the
man who preaches of the advantages of open society to oysters. As
long as a wolf roams outside, a clever sheep sticks to its
shepherd".

This week, Dr M had an unexpected reason for joy: a French court
found Soros guilty of insider trading. Its small fine of $2 million
means little for a man who makes $1 billion a day, but it is
satisfying to see him branded a thief. I would not be amazed to
learn that the terrible excesses of the Zionists in Palestine were
arranged as a diversion of attention away from their Globalist
brethren. While Zionists ruin a village, Soros and the IMF ruin a
country.

Together with Castro, Dr M understood that the source of their power
lies in the overvalued US dollar. Since 1972, the US freely issued
green bucks no longer tied to gold. This financial swindle, the
biggest in the history of mankind, brought enormous wealth to some
people, and ruined a lot more. That is why Malaysia is the brain and
the engine of an ambitious plan to create a stable currency, the
golden Dinar. It is also called the 'Islamic Dinar', as Islamic Law
forbids usury and interest, and the Dinar will bear zero interest.
(A similar step was taken by Solon the Wise in Sixth Century BC
Athens: he cancelled debts, zeroed interest and made people free. A
hundred years later, Athens ushered in its Golden Age.) This year,
the Dinar will become the currency to settle deals between Malaysia
and some Arab countries.

Currency trading, the pet tool of Soros, should be banned, thinks Dr
M: "The traders sell huge sums of currency they do not have to buyers
who are members of the same circle. The buyers in turn sell this
fictitious currency to others, force down the value and buy at the
depressed prices. Short selling has been taken to the ultimate
level. The currency trading is many times bigger than total world
trade."

The New World Order has in Dr M a most outspoken enemy. He views it
as a continuation of old colonialism by new methods: "Free trade had always been the war cry of the Europeans. In the 19th
century they used gunboats to open East Asia for trade. They went to
war when they were not allowed to supply opium to China. Now, the
gunboats have disappeared, but the pressures are no less effective.
An occupation army cannot colonise more effectively than the
economic arm-twisting used by the West. Now international
institutions are used to open up the countries for 'free trade'.
Once the countries are opened up, the big corporations and banks
would move in, and the locals will be swallowed up."

Dr M has not mellowed with years. His thinking has become even more
striking and extraordinary. While visiting Japan, he called upon the
Japanese to reject the Western model as it is sure to ruin their
achievements: Japanese system worked very well for the Japanese. It made Japan the
second most powerful economy in the world. It may not be the Western
way, but it can't be all wrong if it can achieve so much.

In Dr M's view, Japan should return to strong government involvement
in economy, and take up its leading role in Asia, for "East Asia and
the world need Japan, its dynamism and its single-minded
dedication". For Dr M, as for many important politicians in Asia,
WWII was not a war between ultimate good and ultimate evil. "The
success of the Japanese army in the early days of the war finally
broke the spell cast by the Europeans. East Asians learned that
their European overlords could be defeated." Similar sentiments are
voiced in Iran and in Arab countries, where anti-British resentment
brought nationalist leaders to seek help of the Axis Powers.

Malaysia is an 'alternative' country where many Western ideas were
found wanting and were rejected. We are used to frequent changes of
prime ministers and presidents and see it as a success of democracy.
But Dr M, this benevolent king-philosopher in Plato's mould,
disagrees. It takes many years for policies to produce fruits, he
says. First year in power, the ruler learns to be addressed and to
address others properly. Next year, he forms his opinions. Then he
makes decisions, and only in a few years can we judge his decisions
properly. He succeeded because he had enough time, he says.

This idea is unusual for us, but as the matter of fact, three of the
most charismatic and extraordinary statesmen of our days, Dr M, Dr
Fidel Castro and the Pope, persist in power for tens of years with
great success. Commercial companies, nowadays as powerful as any
state, also do not change their helmsmen without urgent need.

Surely, if a statesman like Dr M were to lead Japan, (or China, or
Russia, or, indeed, the EU) the world would be different. Many
things have changed since WWII, and Europeans, together with
ordinary Americans, are now experiencing the brunt of the same
policies Asia suffered in its colonial past. 'The Open Society' has
become the tool for robbery brought home, as the New World Order is
the colonisation of Europeans and Americans by their new financial
elite.

Dr M is a strict opponent of the American War on Terror. For him,
"terrorism never dies until the causes for terrorism are
eliminated". He speaks against the impending Anglo-American
aggression in Iraq, he refuses to accept the rant of 'Islamic
terror'. Dr M supports the much-suffering people of Palestine
without the caveats usually produced by his meek-hearted colleagues
in Europe. His voice is heard, for Malaysia has not surrendered its
discourse to its enemies.

Malaysia reminded me of Cuba, the Island of Freedom in the Caribbean
Sea. It is also an alternative society where highly educated men map
a different future for mankind, for "today's world is in shambles.
The abuses of the free trade system, the unlimited greed of
speculators, have resulted in the world losing its way", in the
words of Dr M. Similar ideas are expressed in Castro's speeches. The
two politicians met a few times and expressed mutual admiration,
despite their huge ideological differences: Castro the Communist and
Dr M the Nationalist. In Cuba and in Malaysia, one can read a
newspaper or watch TV without nausea. These two small countries have
much for us to learn from.